Tyan brings supercomputing to the desktop

EVERY SO OFTEN there comes a genre-bending product, and Tyan has one of those on its stand at CeBIT this year.
It is called the Typhoon PSC or Person Super Computer, and is aimed at the scientific and HPC set. Typhoon PSCs come
either Opteron or P4/PD flavours, and brushed aluminium or black finish.

The point of this box is not to make an ultimate gaming rig, it is meant to take what used to be the domain of a
data centre and move it to under the desktop. There have been three problems with doing this before this point: heat,
power and noise. If you have ever been in a data centre, you know what I mean, putting that in someone's lab, or worse
yet, under their desk, was simply a non-starter.

This relegated people to fighting for time on a big expensive box, or worse yet paying for world-class cooling and
power. Tyan thought there was a better way and built the PSC which solves all three of the problems, it is a
self-contained mini-rack system with cute little handles and wheels. Yay.

There are two PSCs, the Opteron one is the B2881YDS4T and the P4/D model is the B5160YDS4T. Both are basically four
dual socket blades in a box with all the necessary cables and attachments in a nice aluminium case. It also has little
wheels and two carry handles which I have personally tested to get the rear shot here.

The specs vary between the models a bit, but there are eight sockets and up to 16 cores on either one, depending on
how you want to set up the system. The Opteron can handle 64GB of memory, 32 for the Pentium. There is one S-ATA drive
per blade, and they are coupled through GigE on the back. Each blade has an independent 350W PSU for a total of 1400W,
which fits nicely in the 1500W most circuits can provide.

The big problem here can be cooling. If you have ever turned on a modern P4 rack server, it sounds like a Harrier
taking off, and usually does suck for nearby small animals. This one is really quiet, so quiet that I could not hear it
over the fairly low show floor noise until I stuck my ear up to the grill.

Tyan has solved all three of the problems to putting fairly massive compute power in a form factor that dings your
shins every time you put your feet under your desk. Most people in the target market would be more than happy to pay
that price to avoid time sharing on big clusters, that much is a no brainer.

There are a few minor issues with this box. The first is that there is no KVM switch, each blade has a VGA out and
two USB ports, so if you need direct access, you may need an external KVM or to swap cables. Either way, this class of
machines should need little more than an initial imaging and then it is remote control from that point on. The other
problem is the interconnects, basically GigE. A crossover cable would do a lot for latency, but still, it is not
elegant.

These boxes are the first stab at a new class of machines, they do what they say, and do it quietly. It would not
surprise me to see the next version of these boxes with an integrated KVM and Infiniband or other high speed
interconnect in back. For now though, the 'problems' are relatively minor, and the solved problems are relatively
major. It is a good start to a new category, and one that will undoubtedly get better in time. µ